Promoting, advancing and defending Intelligent Design via data, logic and Intelligent Reasoning and exposing the alleged theory of evolution as the nonsense it is.
I also educate evotards about ID and the alleged theory of evolution one tard at a time and sometimes in groups

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Sir Isaac Newton, et al., Support the EF- OM Chokes on it

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"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."- Sir Isaac Newton

The explanatory filter (EF) is a process for doing exactly that a it starts with the minimum (entitites) and then keeps adding them as required.

That is why the EF is the process used to refute any given design inference.

Dembski:The filter is a criterion for distinguishing intelligent from unintelligent causes. Here I am using the word "criterion" in its strict etymological sense as a method for deciding or judging a question. The Explanatory Filter is a criterion for deciding when something is intelligently caused and when it isn't. Does it decide this question reliably?

As with any criterion, we need to make sure that whatever judgments the criterion renders correspond to reality. A criterion for judging the quality of wines is worthless if it judges the rot-gut consumed by winos superior to a fine French Bordeaux. The reality is that a fine French Bordeaux is superior to the wino's rot-gut, and any criterion for discriminating among wines better indicate as much.

Or consider medical tests. Any medical test is a criterion. A perfectly reliable medical test would detect the presence of a disease whenever it is indeed present, and fail to detect the disease whenever it is absent. Unfortunately, no medical test is perfectly reliable, and so the best we can do is keep the proportion of false positives and false negatives as low as possible.

All criteria, and not just medical tests, face the problem of false positives and false negatives. A criterion attempts to classify individuals with respect to a target group (in the case of medical tests, those who have a certain disease). When the criterion classifies an individual who should not be there in the target group, it commits a false positive. Alternatively, when the criterion fails to classify an individual who should be there in the target group, it commits a false negative. Take medical tests again. A medical test checks whether an individual has a certain disease. The target group comprises all those individuals who actually have the disease. When the medical test classifies an individual who doesn't have the disease with those who do, it commits a false positive. When the medical test classifies an individual who does have the disease with those who do not, it commits a false negative.

Joe, can you give a single example of the EF distinguishing intelligent from unintelligent causes? Ideally in biology (HIV, a banana) but you can choose anything you like.